The harsh truth behind vendor guff

Les Hatton

I was idly flicking through a computer magazine last week when it struck me just how much this industry now wallows in nonsense, ambiguity and hyperbole. Take for example the use of the word “availability”. This common expression is essentially meaningless when it comes to computing.

In conventional engineering, we use the concept of “reliability” to mean obvious measures such as MTBF (mean time between failures), MTTF (mean time to fail) and PFOD (probability of failure on demand). Such measures have an immediate impact – for example, if I tell you a modern disk drive has a MTBF of 1,000,000 hours (about 114 years), you would not expect it to break very often.

In contrast, a system with 99.9 percent availability may sound good but it actually corresponds to about one crash a day, which is hopeless. If the system is made to boot twice as quickly, say by turning off the disk checks, its availability climbs to 99.95 percent, but it still crashes once a day. In other words, making the system worse in an important way actually improves its availability. This is why, of course, people use availability instead of reliability – it can hide a multitude of sins.

System providers are still doing it, of course. I noticed a full-page ad for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 this week. It said their customer’s “largest application requires 99.999 percent availability and it runs on new SQL Server 2005”. It then marked this with a microscopic footnote in white on a whitish background (I had to use a magnifying glass to read it) that said “Results not typical...”.

Let us analyse this in three ways. First, 99.999 percent availability is the computer industry’s way of telling you the system crashes about once every two months, which is not very good and considerably worse than Linux for example. Second, the sentence says the application requires it but it does not say that SQL Server 2005 delivers it. Third, the footnote explains that it’s irrelevant anyway – truly a splendid example of incisive and informative English, but would you risk investing based on statements of this nature?

Shaking my head with a sigh, I then ploughed head on into an article detailing the various IT plans of the Department for Work and Pensions, in which I found the following statement by the minister for pensions. “We are future-proofing the business through systematic industry benchmarking to get industry-leading value for money.”

Does anybody know what this is supposed to mean? The words are all in my dictionary but this statement strings them together in such a way as to eliminate any real meaning.

This, of course, is much of the problem. Many system specifications I see are written in content-free form like this. Caveat emptor.